Would you let your friends be cashiers?

Would you try to organize cashiers? Would you try to organize other retail workers?

Would you work together with groups that try to unionize cashiers? Would you work together with groups that argue cashiers are cops and thus shouldn't be part of the socialist movement? If not what is the correct political response (engage with the group online/ engage in physical space in discussions with the group/continue organizing cashiers or retail workers).

Are cashiers part of the working class?

If cashiers are fine, who and what is the problem here?

Does your answers change depending on whether the cashiers are working a register tallying up food prices, cinema tickets, swimming pool tickets or park/museum entries?

Please be nice and remember the no sectarian rule. This post is mostly to highlight some contradictions and tensions in real existing capitalism and your social and friend sphere. It might also highlight classism that unhoused or neurodivergent or poc comrades might be able to highlight.

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  • JohnBrownsBussy2 [she/her, they/them]
    ·
    1 year ago

    Taking this comment a bit seriously (which I don't think was intended), I think the central fallacy here is the idea that commodity production comes to a halt when a good is "finished." A warehouse of linen coats is not a commodity if those coats are not up for sale, and putting those coats up for sale takes significant additional labor. The workers involved in transporting, stocking and maintaining commodities, as well as those involved in facilitating these transactions are part of the process that allows for a good to achieve exchange value. Cashiers are subject to surplus value extraction: they can be made to be more productive or increase their absolute workload in order to facilitate capitalist returns.

    Obviously, cashiers aren't cops as cashiers aren't foot-soldiers of the ruling class: they aren't called up to break up collective actions, murder socialists or terrorize internal colonies. Unlike policing, cashiers aren't even a profession, it's just one task that retail workers are expected to do along with a litany of other tasks.

    • JuneFall [none/use name]
      ·
      1 year ago

      While it isn't a completely serious post, I think it is good that most would have an answer to that question.

      You are absolutely right that stuff in a warehouse or a retail location still needs work to be brought to use, which is one task of retail workers. Though you write correctly that serving on the checkout (what a person named Patrick in Graeber's Bullshit Jobs describes as some of the worst aspects of one of his jobs, that could be easily done by a machine, prompting him to say he couldn't wait for "full communism") is one of the tasks of retail workers. Some retail workers are even only used on the till and ensure some loss prevention and are a filter and social control against marginalized people and those not paying the entry. In terms of some reactionary libraries or museum they are tasked with not allowing people read as marginalized in, even if the entry into the location is free. This of course can change depending on class consciousness of the workers.

      Cashiers are working class since they have to work to subsist, they also - typically - don't have capital or rents to subsist from (this is a thing that sometimes isn't true for part time pensioners who work the till). Thus they are of course to be organized and as you correctly pointed out, most are handling other tasks, too.

      Cashiers who are serving primarily as bouncer, are a different matter and in my opinion create good reasons for the organized left and anarchists to create free spaces in which entertainment can be consumed without the need to pay, as social spaces of engagement and entertainment are paramount for social networks that are to be used in union and other work. However even then cashiers in movie theaters and the other things I mentioned are to be organized, too. They remain working class and their function has to be developed through industrial and collective action. The function the reserve army serves is to be understood and that it could hit any one of us gets very clear during discussions about industrial actions or strikes and unionization.

      Excerpt from Bullshit Jobs

      It was considered a good thing that there might be a few years in a young man’s or woman’s life where money was not the primary motivation; where he or she could thus be free to pursue other forms of value: say, philosophy, poetry, athletics, sexual experimentation, altered states of consciousness, politics, or the history of Western art. Nowadays it is considered important they should work. However, it is not considered important they should work at anything useful. In fact, like Rufus they’re barely expected to work at all, just to show up and pretend to do so. A number of students wrote just to complain to me about this phenomenon. Here Patrick reflects on his job as a casual retail assistant in a student union convenience store:

      Patrick: I didn’t actually need the job (I was getting by financially without it), but after some pressure from my family, I applied for it out of some warped sense of obligation to get experience in work to prepare me for whatever lay ahead beyond university. In reality, the job just took away time and energy from other activities I had been doing, like campaigning and activism, or reading for pleasure, which I think made me resent it even more. The job was pretty standard for a student union convenience store and involved serving people on the till (could have easily been done by a machine) with the explicitly stated requirement, in my performance review after my trial period, that I “should be more positive and happy when serving customers.”

      So not only did they want me to do work that could have beenperformed by a machine just as effectively, they wanted me to pretend that I was enjoying that state of affairs.

      It was just about bearable if my shift was during lunchtime, when it got really busy, so time went by relatively quickly. Being on shift on a Sunday afternoon when nobody frequented the SU was just appalling. They had this thing about us not being able to just do nothing, even if the shop was empty. So we couldn’t just sit at the till and read a magazine. Instead, the manager made up utterly meaningless work for us to do, like going round the whole shop and checking that things were in date (even though we knew for a fact they were because of the turnover rate) or rearranging products on shelves in even more pristine order than they already were.

      The very, very worst thing about the job was that it gave you so much time to think, because the work was so lacking in any intellectual demand. So I just thought so much about how bullshit my job was, how it could be done by a machine, how much I couldn’t wait for full communism, and just endlessly theorized the alternatives to a system where millions of human beings have to do that kind of work for their whole lives in order to survive. I couldn’t stop thinking about how miserable it made me.

      This is what happens, of course, when you first open the entire world of social and political possibility to a young mind by sending it to college and then tell it to stop thinking and tidy up already tidy shelves. Parents now feel it is important that young minds should have this experience. But what, precisely, was Patrick supposed to be learning through this exercise?